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Miguel Clark Mallet

Miguel Clark Mallet Born in Germany during the same year that construction began on the Berlin Wall, Miguel Clark Mallet grew up as an Army brat on military bases across the United States and in Latin America. Early in life, he became fascinated with both spirituality and language, a connection fed by his years as an altar boy, and cemented by the nun in his 8th grade year of Catholic school who taught both his English and religion classes. Mallet originally studied journalism in college (he particularly enjoyed copy editing), eventually earning a bachelor’s degree in English and then an MFA in fiction.

He spent the bulk of the next 20 years as a college-level writing teacher and writing program administrator in North Carolina, Iowa, and Arizona, where he earned a Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition; he also had a short stint as a technical editor. Mallet’s current interests center on the intersection of the personal, the social (especially involving race), and the spiritual, and on writing — its ambiguity and fluidity — as a means to explore that intersection. He believes in writing as a tool for both reflection, disruption, and transformation. Currently at work on both a speculative fiction novel and a long work blending verse, memoir, polemic, and fiction, he writes, runs, and lives in the Twin Cities.

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As a culture, we celebrate simplicity and its convenience. But the truth is always more complex, embedded in larger systems and worlds. Miguel Clark Mallet on the possibilities that open up when we accept the value of complexity.

Social media gets a bad rap for perpetuating vitriol and echo chambers, but it can also be an platform for our common and civic life — helping us understand people with different backgrounds and opinions, while also allowing us to create communities of our own.

What if we considered our nation not as factions at war, but as members of a strained and troubled family? A look through the lens of the three stories that broken families tell — and what that marginalized, third story reveals about the echo chambers we've been called to step out of.

A writer contemplates the hubris at the heart of the American experiment, and the painful but possible path that leads to our nation’s redemption.

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